Developing a factory-wide intelligent predictive maintenance system based on Industry 4.0

The main purpose of predictive maintenance (PdM) is to reduce unscheduled downtime and consequently improve productivity and reduce production cost. PdM has been featured as a key theme of Industry 4.0. However, the traditional PdM system was only designed for a single tool; as such, the resources allocation will become extremely complicated when hundreds of tools are working together in a factory. A manageable hierarchy and various health indexes are required for factory-wide equipment maintenance. To solve the problem mentioned above, this paper proposes a factory-wide intelligent predictive maintenance system by applying the so-called cyber-physical agent and advanced manufacturing cloud of Things to fulfill the requirements of Industry 4.0, the baseline predictive maintenance scheme to accomplish the PdM functions, and the newly proposed health index hierarchy to supervise factory-wide equipment maintenance.